No alternatives

Highlighting the Home Office’s refusal to issue alternative proof of immigration status despite the well-documented issues individuals are having with the system, DPG said the challenge will focus on the fact that the statutory framework does, in fact, give the home secretary the discretion to allow alternatives where appropriate.

“Her refusal to do so is therefore arguably unlawful as it is a fetter of her discretion and irrational,” it wrote, adding that while the Home Office has implemented several “workarounds” for those experiencing issues – including ways for landlords, employers and others to verify immigration status using the system, as well as means to report eVisa issues via an online form and helpline – such avenues are often “inadequate”.

DPG said this was largely due to delays on the Home Office’s end, “which leaves individuals without proof of their lawful status and exposed to the full force of the hostile/compliant environment”.

Speaking with Computer Weekly, DPG solicitor Unkha Banda said although the firm had been receiving a high volume of referrals related to the eVisa system before the phasing out of paper documents on 1 January 2025, there was a notable uptick in referrals after that date as people started facing real consequences of not having a working eVisa.

Banda added that a successful case could “open the doors for everyone to be able to benefit from it”, particularly if the Home Office is legally forced to start issuing and accepting alternative proof of status.

“That means if there are problems with an eVisa that the Home Office are taking a long time to fix, for whatever reason, then people will have something else to rely on, so there isn’t that gap in terms of access to rights and entitlements,” she said, highlighting that the case could also reduce similar gaps that may spring up with the government’s roll-out of mandatory digital ID.

“Digital IDs are going to be implemented for everyone, and I imagine the system will probably be similar to this, so if we can find ways of fixing this system before it’s rolled out to 70 million people, it would be fantastic.”

Over 10 million eVisas have now been issued, and the vast majority of people with an eVisa continue to use them without any problems

In early December 2025, a research report also raised concerns about the eVisa system being a precursor of what’s to come with digital ID, arguing that efforts to digitise the immigration system represent an opportunity to test such systems on a precarious section of the population before extending them out more broadly.  

“The Home Office can take immediate steps to reduce the anxiety that migrants are experiencing by giving them the safety of a physical or digital backup that will allow them to prove their status in any circumstances,” said Sara Alsherif, migrants digital justice programme manager at Open Rights Group (ORG), at the time, which collaborated with the authors on creating the report.

“However, root and branch reform of this system is also needed, and lessons must be learnt, especially as the government intends to roll digital ID out to everyone in the UK.”

Responding to the issues raised by the judicial review, a Home Office spokesperson said: “Over 10 million eVisas have now been issued, and the vast majority of people with an eVisa continue to use them without any problems.

“They cannot be lost, stolen, or tampered with, and provide a secure digital way to prove someone’s right to work or enter this country lawfully. We stand ready to support any users who encounter difficulties creating or using their eVisa accounts.”

Long-standing eVisa issues

Computer Weekly previously reported, in January 2025, that despite repeated warnings from civil society and migrant support groups, which started as early as October 2021, people were already having trouble proving their immigration status while travelling back to the country, just two weeks after the UK’s formal transition to the eVisa system.

While groups like ORG and the3million have directly proposed alternatives to the Home Office, such as the use of QR code or “stable token” systems, the department’s eVisa policy team insisted as far back as December 2023 that it would not “compromise on the real-time aspect” of the eVisa checks, as “any check of an individual’s immigration status must be done in real time to reflect the current immigration status held” on its systems.

“As we warned, people are having problems using eVisas to travel back to the UK,” said the ORG at the time. “We asked the Home Office to make the simple change of allowing people to have a QR code. This could be saved or printed without having to rely on a flawed online-only system.

“Many refugees are still waiting for their eVisas,” it said. “Without them, they cannot work, set up a bank account, rent somewhere to live or claim benefits. The Home Office needs to sort out this mess urgently.”

The Home Office also states in the eVisa terms and conditions that it will take no liability for any problems or disruptions, and direct or indirect losses, when using a UKVI account – including for “any information that is lost or corrupted while data is being transmitted, processed or downloaded from the UKVI account” – which ORG said implies the department “is already aware of the many technical issues with the eVisa scheme and is pre-emptively protecting itself against legitimate legal claims”.

ORG and others have said the use of eVisas should be seen in the context of the UK’s “hostile environment” approach, which is intended to make life in the UK as difficult as possible for people choosing to live there.

For Banda, the fact that the Home Office has known about all of these issues with digital-only visas for so long, without taking meaningful action to resolve them, is “quite concerning”.

She also said that despite DPG and many other organisations trying to get a sense of how widespread the problem is, the department is refusing to provide figures on the number of people reporting issues or how long it takes on average to get problems solved.

Given that millions of people are now required to prove their immigration status via the system, even a 1% error rate would mean tens of thousands of people are affected at the very least.

Computer Weekly contacted the Home Office about error rates with the eVisa system, but received no on-the-record response.

‘A hostile and unresponsive bureaucracy’

In June 2025, people experiencing technical errors with the Home Office’s eVisa system told Computer Weekly about the psychological toll of not being able to reliably prove their immigration status in the face of a hostile and unresponsive bureaucracy.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, those affected variously told Computer Weekly that the entire experience had been “anxiety-inducing,” and described how their lives had been thrust into “uncertainty” by the transition.

Each also described how the “inordinate amount of stress” associated with not being able to reliably prove their immigration status had been made worse by a lack of responsiveness and help from the Home Office, which they accused of essentially leaving them in the lurch.

In one case that was reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the technical errors with data held by the Home Office were so severe that the ICO found there had been a breach of UK data protection law.

According to Banda, while clients are instructed to report their issues to the Home Office first before DPG takes them on, unless the case is particularly urgent, the vast majority are given vague responses without time frames.

“Most of the time, by the time the case gets to us, nothing has changed, but we found that once we get involved and start sending pre-action letters, then they start fixing the eVisas,” she said, adding that sometimes clients’ eVisa issues are being resolved after a case has already been issued.

On the legal recourse available to people once their problems have been fixed, Banda noted that while a judicial review can only be taken forward if the issues are still active, those affected can still make civil claims for compensation if they were negatively impacted in the interim by, for example, losing out on employment or being denied benefits.

“In cases where we send pre-letters and then the Home Office fixes it, you can’t then go to court,” she said. “Or, for example, if you go to court and they fix it before the judge looks at it, then the government would start arguing that the whole case is academic because the eVisa has been fixed.”

It should  be noted that even if people’s eVisa issues are resolved once, Computer Weekly has heard concerns that, because of how the system is set up to trawl dozens of disparate government databases in real time, every time a status is needed, the same people could once again find themselves without access to a working eVisa.

In a follow-up Freedom of Information request to the ICO about the volume of eVisa-related data protection complaints made in the past year, the regulator said that searching through the approximately 425 cases linked to the Home Office in that time would exceed the cost limit.

The ICO added that it does not record the requested information in a way that is easily reportable, meaning it would be required to manually search hundreds of records to identify the information requested.